Birth Control and Contraception

Birth control pills have been an essential tenet of reproductive healthcare since their popularization in the 1960s. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the landmark case Griswold v. Connecticut, which outlawed bans on contraception for married couples, contributed to the pill’s growing popularity in the second half of the 1960s. Today millions of women in the U.S. use birth control pills for a variety of reasons, including preventing pregnancy, managing menstrual symptoms and treating medical conditions like PCOS and endometriosis.

All contraceptive methods can be used to prevent pregnancy, but only some reduce the risk of STI transmission. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 65 percent of U.S. women aged 15-49 were using at least one form of contraception. Common contraceptive methods include condoms, IUDs, cervical caps, and permanent forms such as vasectomies and tubal ligation.

Access to contraceptives and birth control is under attack by Project 2025 and extremist groups trying to ban practices that promote sexual health and well-being. Many anti-contraceptive extremists seek to spread misinformation and employ scare tactics to intimidate those trying to access this essential form of healthcare. Reliable information about birth control pills and other forms of contraception can be found online via Planned Parenthood, Bedsider or Guttmacher. For medical advice, talk to your doctor about deciding the best contraceptive method for you.

What to Know About Later Abortions: Myths, Barriers and Patient Stories

PUBLISHED 7/7/2026 by

Later abortion is one of the most stigmatized and least understood aspects of reproductive health, and yet some of the voices perpetuating that stigma come from inside the reproductive rights movement itself. Meanwhile, while most abortions happen in the first trimester, later abortions are increasing as restrictions and bans are delaying care and creating the very conditions that make them necessary.

To address these misconceptions, Erika Christensen and Garin Marschall created Patient Forward after Christensen experienced a later abortion in 2016. The organization is dedicated to eliminating later abortion stigma and barriers.

“We have a lot of folks in the media, including repro[ductive rights] advocates, saying, ‘Nobody wants to do this,’ or, ‘It’s not even available,’ or, ‘Nobody’s getting abortions that late.’ Yes, they are. They’re getting them in safe, modern, incredibly compassionate abortion clinics,” said Christensen. “We do a lot of destigmatizing work.”

Patient Forward emphasizes that most people who obtain a later abortion would have preferred to access an abortion earlier: “Contrary to popular rhetoric, patients do not wait. Rather, they are delayed.”

“We have found that young people are much later to recognize they’re pregnant because their periods are irregular anyway, because they may not be familiar with all the symptoms of pregnancy,” says Dr. Diana Foster Greene of University of California San Francisco. “People with chronic health conditions are also later to discover they’re pregnant because often chronic health conditions have the same symptoms of pregnancy.”

The Antiabortion Playbook Is Coming for Birth Control

PUBLISHED 6/29/2026 by

The United States is on its way to banning or severely restricting birth control.

I know this statement will be met with incredulity—but I would refer you to the disbelief so many of us in the reproductive health field faced when we warned that the constitutional right to abortion was in danger. Nearly four years later, we are living in this reality that so many dismissed as alarmist fantasy.

If the anti-contraception tactics we see today look extremely familiar, it’s because they come straight from the antiabortion playbook: spreading mis- and disinformation, advancing incremental regressive policies, and denying problems with access—the same tactics that helped pave the way for the eventual overturning of Roe.

Keeping Score: Abortion Bans Cost $140B Per Year; Federal Courts Protect Trans Youth and Incarcerated Trans Women; Feminists React to FBI Raid on Ohio Voting Rights Organization

PUBLISHED 6/24/2026 by

In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in this biweekly roundup.

This week:
—Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas) is working to get Republicans on the record on the Right to Contraception Act.
—ICE has already reported the deaths of 18 detainees this year, on pace to surpass the highest number of deaths in decades.
—Abortion restrictions could cost the U.S. economy $140 billion annually in lost earnings.
—”I love the inflation,” says Trump.
—The EEOC will no longer require federal agencies to report on race, ethnicity, sex or gender identity.
—83 percent of American voters agree that emergency contraception should be easily accessible.
—Abortion ban states are slowly losing a generation of women medical students and doctors.
—More than 770,000 children have already lost access to SNAP benefits after last year’s funding cuts.
—A new study found trans women athletes have no significant physical advantages over cis women.
—Missouri has restored access to medication abortions after a Jackson County judge struck down key state restrictions, allowing clinics to resume providing the service and marking the first time medication abortion has been available in Missouri since 2018.
—Republicans passed a reconciliation bill that provides roughly $70 billion for ICE and CBP, sending it to President Trump’s desk. (This is on top of more than $140 billion Republicans already provided for those agencies last year.)

… and more.

Conservative Justices Resurrect the Comstock Act, Threatening Abortion Access Nationwide

PUBLISHED 5/21/2026 by

On May 1, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the mailing of mifepristone, one of the most widely used abortion medications in the country, threatening access for patients already facing a shrinking number of clinics nationwide. Although the Supreme Court temporarily stayed the ruling earlier this month, Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent revealed something even more alarming: a renewed effort to resurrect the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law once used to criminalize the mailing of abortion- and contraception-related materials.

The Comstock Act’s history is deeply tied to censorship, moral policing and attacks on marginalized communities. Under its broad and subjective definition of “obscenity,” authorities targeted contraception, abortion information, sexual health materials, queer literature and even works of classical art. Its reproductive restrictions disproportionately harmed poor and working-class women, who were often cut off from the safest and most affordable forms of care.

Today, antiabortion activists are once again looking to Comstock as a tool to restrict abortion nationwide—this time through the courts. Thomas’ explicit invocation of the law in the mifepristone fight signals how far-right legal movements are attempting to revive long-discredited morality laws to roll back reproductive freedom and other established rights.

They Blame Feminism for Falling Birth Rates—but Data Says It’s Saving Families

PUBLISHED 5/6/2026 by

Last month, the newest fertility data dropped—and the U.S. fertility rate has fallen again, hitting another record low.

Almost immediately, conservative influencers, media figures and elected officials pointed fingers at feminism, blaming women’s independence, career ambitions and access to contraception for the decline in births.

It’s a convenient narrative to push along their anti-birth control agenda. But it’s also wrong.

If you actually listen to women—and look at the data—the story becomes much clearer. The number one reason women are delaying or forgoing having children isn’t ideology, it’s affordability. Childcare costs, housing prices and healthcare access have made starting a family financially daunting for millions of Americans. Mix in student loan debt and political turmoil, and having a baby in 2026 is a scary venture. 

And yet, instead of addressing these barriers, policymakers—and organizations leading the way like the Heritage Foundation—are moving in the opposite direction. They are cutting or rolling back the very programs that make family life possible.

Trump’s Budget Plunders Birth Control and Reproductive Health Programs—With Open Derision for Americans Who Need Them

PUBLISHED 4/30/2026 by

Title X is the federal program that funds family planning and reproductive health services nationwide—and under President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for 2027, it would be effectively eliminated, reshaping access to care for women across the country.

What is perhaps most jarring, on close reading, is not only what the budget proposes, but how it speaks. The language throughout the administration’s budget and HHS documents departs from traditional bureaucratic norms, adopting a tone that is at times openly mocking and vilifying. Programs serving women, LGBTQ people and marginalized communities are described in terms that signal not just opposition, but disdain. It is a stark reminder that federal budgets do more than allocate resources—they reflect who this government is for, and who it is not.

(This essay is part of an ongoing Ms. series examining the real-world impact of President Donald Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2027 budget. Across sectors—from healthcare and childcare to immigration enforcement and food assistance—the series explores what the administration’s funding priorities reveal about who government serves, and who it leaves behind.)

Keeping Score: Pennsylvania ERA Secures Abortion Rights Win; Civil Rights Groups Investigate Trump Admin Delays in Childcare Payments; Senate Upholds Near-Total VA Abortion Ban

PUBLISHED 4/23/2026 by

In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in this biweekly roundup.

This week:
—In a landmark ruling shaped by Pennsylvania’s ERA, a state court struck down a decades-old ban on using Medicaid funds for abortion.
—Trump continued to attack voting rights, threatening mail-in ballots and moving towards a nationalized registration database full of errors.
—An estimated 8 million people attended the latest “No Kings” protests.
—A Michigan court ruled that the state’s Pregnancy Exclusion law, which prevents providers from honoring pregnant women’s documented end-of-life decisions, violates a voter-approved 2022 constitutional amendment.
—A federal judge blocked RFK Jr.’s changes to routine vaccination schedules.
—The Supreme Court ruled against Colorado’s ban on dangerous “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ youth.
—Housing markets are declining in states with abortion bans as young people leave or avoid those areas.
—Senators demand the Trump Administration release lifesaving Title X funding.
—Twenty-five states received a failing grade on access to sexual and reproductive healthcare.
—High levels of contamination were found in braiding hair.
—Women are driven away from coaching college sports by pay inequities and other systemic barriers.

… and more.

Right-Wing ‘Tradwife’ Influencers Are Telling Young Women Lies About Birth Control

PUBLISHED 4/20/2026 by

Cancer. Infertility. Unintended abortion.

These are just a few of the fears young patients bring to Dr. Bayo Curry-Winchell, a family physician in Reno, Nevada.

Curry-Winchell, medical director for the Saint Mary’s Urgent Care Group, said the trend away from hormonal birth control has become pervasive in recent years among her patients between about 14 and 32 years old—the same age group most likely to say they get their health information from social media.

When she talks with young patients, Curry-Winchell hears concerns about sinister long-term impacts of hormonal birth control—and the language often echoes conservative influencers who have no medical training.

Doctors say what is at stake is not whether every patient chooses the pill or an IUD, but whether they can make evidence-based decisions about preventing pregnancy in a country with some of the highest maternal mortality rates among wealthy nations.

Fewer Teen Births Is Good, Unless You’re the Patriarchy

PUBLISHED 4/17/2026 by

How on-brand for the federal government to announce that U.S. birth rates are falling—just as The Testaments, the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, dropped on Hulu.

In the fictional nation of Gilead, first envisioned by Margaret Atwood in her 1985 dystopian novel and expanded on screen for nearly a decade now, declining fertility catalyzed a Christian nationalist revolution in modern-day America, spawning a society rooted in patriarchal dominance and state-sanctioned violence. The Testaments, now three episodes in, is making a deliberate appeal to Gen Z and young viewers, featuring the spectacularly savvy Chase Infiniti and Lucy Halliday among Gilead’s tradwife-in-training rebels.

Doubly fascinating then, that it is the real-life status of teen birth rates in particular now driving the news. In a drop considered “extraordinary” by statisticians, the number of babies born to mothers between the ages of 15 and 19 fell by 7 percent in 2025.

Nevertheless, many on the right jumped directly into the fray to publicly lament that teens are having fewer babies.

Keeping Score: Trump Attacks Iran, Pressures Senate Republicans to Pass ‘Show Your Papers’ Voter Registration Bill; States Expand Access to Childcare and Paid Leave

PUBLISHED 3/19/2026 by

In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in this biweekly roundup.

This week:
—Dolores Huerta breaks her silence at 96: “I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor.”
—Trump pressures Senate Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act, a “show your papers” policy that would require U.S. citizens to show a passport or birth certificate in order to register to vote.
—A performative personnel exchange at DHS: from Kristi Noem … to Markwayne Mullin?
—The U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran, killing at least 1,332 people.
—March 10 is Abortion Provider Appreciation Day.
—DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was fired, as ICE reports 32 deaths in detention facilities in 2025.
—Access to early prenatal care is declining in the U.S., especially in states with abortion bans.
—A record one-third of American workers not have access to government-mandated paid leave.
—The U.S. deported a gay woman to Morocco, where her sexuality is illegal and she faces violence from her family.
—Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed gender-affirming mental healthcare for trans youth is “child abuse.”
—New Mexico and New York take steps towards free universal childcare.
—Jessie Buckley took home the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her role in Hamnet. The film was directed by Chloé Zhao, one of nine women to ever be nominated for the award of Best Director and the only woman nominated this year.

… and more.